A Feature Representation for Map Building and Path Planning

We explain how most conventional approaches to the problem of visually guided robot navigation are fundamentally restricted. Starting with a specification of the requirements of a general purpose visually guided robot which includes, robustness, autonomy, flexibility and scalability, we then develop an approach to the solution of map building and path planning which operates within a learning framework. We suggest a new representation of shape using features based on geometric co-occurrence which has the capabilities of providing such metric information and is expected to have similar recognition properties to other techniques based on relational geometric measures.